How Obama's Lady-Parts Deal Empowers the Church

The president has revealed his "compromise" on the ginned-up controversy regarding whether or not Catholic institutions would have to cover the cost of contraception for their employees of any faith under the terms of the Affordable Care Act. In doing so, he has proposed a reasonable alternative: the institutions don't have to provide contraception, but the insurance companies will be required to offer it with no co-pays. In other words, priests don't kill sperm, insurance companies do.

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The problem, of course, is that the president is doing so after getting blackjacked for a week by opportunistic Republicans, timorous Beltway liberal Catholics, and the adherents of the Clan Of The Red Beanie, something to which the president alluded in his remarks today. The other problem is that he has proposed a reasonable alternative to two of the most unreasonable institutions on the planet — the insurance companies and the Roman Catholic Church.

Essentially, he's demanding that the insurance companies accept a minimal payments for drugs from which they can reap windfall profits. You may not have noticed, but insurance companies are notably reluctant to do that. And what's to prevent the clever Catholic CEO of Greedy Bastard Health Insurance, LLC from deciding that he has an objection of conscience to providing contraception as part of his company's insurance plan. (If there's one thing that insurance companies produce more of than profits for their executives, it's arcane reasons not to do something. And, as for the institutional Church, it has no earthly reason to accept this deal. It doesn't think anyone should use birth control for any reason ever. If it accepts the deal, by which it essentially farms out its conscience to insurance companies, it looks foolish. If it sticks to its guns and rejects the deal, what's the president going to do? Run against the Church? He pretty plainly doesn't have the stomach for that. The Clan is empowered again. The comeback from the conspiracy to obstruct justice of the crime of sexual assault is complete.

The Church has claimed — and the president has tacitly accepted — the right to deny even its employees of other faiths the health-care services of which it doesn't approve on strictly doctrinal grounds. That is not an issue of "religious liberty." That's the enshrinement of religious thuggery in the secular law. By accepting that frame, the president has left himself dependent on the avaricious to bail him out against the arrogant. This is not a comfortable place to be.

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And that's not even to get into the obvious fact that women's-health issues have been treated as little more than a bargaining chip by a Democratic president. Again.

Splash.

UPDATE (4:18 p.m.): I see from the peanut gallery that it is suggested that I may have underestimated the president's political jujitsu on this issue. However, I'd like to hear a clear exposition of the following: What political advantages has the president gained from his accommodation on this issue that didn't exist in the status quo ante? Before the controversy broke, health-insurance plans had to cover contraception, except in the case of explicitly religious organizations engaged in specifically religious work, and all the polling data suggested that the American people wanted it that way. According to all available polling data, the bishops were already a marginalized opposition holding firm to a marginalized opinion. The traditional Catholic policy on birth control already was as unpopular and ignored as it had been since 1965. The Republicans were already on the losing side of this issue. Yet, in less than two weeks of ginned-up phony outrage, the marginalized opposition got the White House to move off its original position. Now, if you want to argue that all of these political advantages have been increased and sharpened because of what the president did — e.g. the bishops now look even more unreasonable — I guess you can, but I'd argue that they don't really give a damn about that, and they never have. I'm less sanguine than Amanda is that the White House will be running "We Saved The Pill!" ads this fall. I think the whole argument for "religious liberty" — a phrase the president never should have used in its current political context — is going to spread throughout the campaign now, and it's going to revitalize all the social issues. I do not believe in cooler heads prevailing, or that this is a reasonable nation willing to listen to reasonable accommodations. But, hell, I could be wrong, too.

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